Book Review: Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam

everal lives intertwine
in this frank, slice-of life
portrayal of the medical
profession. Recognizing
that the characters
—early career doctors and
a few patients—represent
extreme interpretations of
himself, Vincent Lam, an
emergency-room physician based in Toronto,
humanizes the profession, each character a
portrait of the personalities and rich internal
conflicts prevalent in the field. "Because
medicine has so much to do with these really
visceral basic things, life and death and hope
and sometimes disappointment, it's a profession
that forces people to ask some difficult
personal questions," he says.

"It can require
quite a perspective shift." Fitzgerald, a young
man whose raw passion leads him somewhat
blindly into medicine, stumbles after unrequited
love and tempers his difficult job with
black humor and alcohol. Two sparring characters,
Sri, a sensitive-minded student, and
Ming, at times represent polar notions of how
one might view a medical situation: "empiric,
scientific and ultimately dispassionate," says
Lam, or "as something which is mysterious
and unpredictable and ultimately very
ambiguous."

For each character, their instinct
carries both triumphs and flaws. Perspective
shifts drop the reader in and out of characters'
lives with revealing encounters—a mother
undergoes a cesarean without anesthesia to
save her child, a doctor dies from exposure to
SARS patients, a wounded criminal uses his
means to hurt the officers that assaulted him.
Says Lam of the story's moral dilemmas, "to
not feel vulnerable is to miss one of the most
important and valuable lessons that one
should learn from medical training, that life is
actually pretty fragile and sometimes we can
do something about it and sometimes we
can't. That's been an important lesson for me."